26 Quotes About Reviewers

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.

The main challenges for a reviewer in peer reviewing:- Knowing the field to which a certain manuscript belongs very well.- Having experience in reviewing manuscripts.- Having abilities to make reviewer’s remarks clear.- Having enough time to evaluate the manuscript in depth.- Obeying the editorial deadline for doing a review.- Having a strong interest in scholarly journals.- Being fluent in English.

The worst problem of peer reviewing is its time consuming nature.

Reevaluate your abilities each time when you have been offered to reviewan article. And say no thanks if the topic doesn’t belong to the field of your expertise.

Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday’s commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms.

Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before 'the writing on the wall' and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.

What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.

The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.